If you work with machine-generated content or have used machine-translated texts on your website, now is the time to prick up your ears!
Google has been rolling out updates since summer 2022, including its so-called Helpful Content update in August and its spam update in October. These have already had an impact on the current and future content production of a great many companies. As Google’s mission is to prioritise high-quality content and to help users find what they are looking for, all content that Google categorises either as bad or as outright spam will now be deprioritised in its search results.
So what do companies need to keep in mind going forward if they are to keep on the good side of Google’s intelligent new SpamBrain? We are going to be looking at all that and more in today’s blog post. So read on and find out!
What Is Bad Content According To Google?
The new updates are designed to help Google do even better at distinguishing between good and bad content.
According to Google itself, bad content and spam are defined as:
- Texts that contain keywords but make no sense to the reader.
- Texts translated by an automated tool without regards for quality or user experience.
- Texts that are stitched together from various existing website texts without adding sufficient original value of their own.
This means it is no longer tenable to simply upload any old thing onto your website, as there is now a greater risk that it will get buried under the huge volumes out there – and that would be a true shame if you have already invested lots of time and money in your content.
Spammy Activities And Unhelpful Content
At this stage, nobody knows concretely what these new updates will entail, but there is a lot to suggest that spam-like link-building activities and poor-quality content will primarily be in the firing line.
Google’s new Helpful Content Update classifies web content as either helpful or unhelpful. This means that an intelligent algorithm scans your website to assess whether the content it contains is helpful or not. If a website appears to hold more unhelpful content than helpful content, then Google will prioritise other websites instead – even if there may also be some very good and useful content on the page, as well.
AI-Generated Content and Machine Translations
If we go by what Google themselves have already said is bad content, then there is a lot to suggest that companies should refrain from publishing AI-generated content and machine translations. Recently, ChatGPT has been taking the world by storm with its slightly too human-sounding texts, and students have already using this new technology to help them with their assignments.
Although such tools can help save us a lot of time, the risk is that we will plummet downwards in Google’s rankings.
How To Avoid Google’s Spam Filter
The best and safest way to avoid Google’s spam filter is to make sure your website content is well produced and to steer well clear of artificial intelligence and dodgy links.
With these new updates already upon us, now might be the right time to start reviewing your web content, and to keep the following in mind:
- Avoid publishing machine-generated texts.
- Avoid the use of machine translations.
- Remove or rewrite duplicate content.
- If your website allows user-generated content, you might want to consider whether this is still viable, as it may be a source for low-quality content or spam that will ultimately threaten your position in Google’s rankings.
- If you decide to use AI-generated content anyway, make sure to always have a human post-edit the text before publishing.
Multilingual Websites
If you have a website that you want translated into multiple languages, it may be tempting to simply feed everything through a machine and get a multilingual website in just a few minutes, but that is perhaps not a good idea following these new updates from Google.
Here at COMUNICA, we offer human and professional translations of your entire website, so they will appear trustworthy and generate value for your online visitors. We help companies across many different industries to expand their reach through the use of a multilingual website that they can rest assured is of high quality in every language. We can also implement SEO best practices to make sure you do not end up at the bottom of Google’s search results.
Thanks to our many years of experience within website optimisation, you can trust that every aspect of your translated web texts, from SEO and specialist terms to style, grammar and localisation, will all be top notch. Proofreading and SEO are two important quality-assurance tools when it comes to the translation of websites as it is precisely through these processes that we can remove and rewrite content that is liable to fall foul of Google’s new rules.